Venkatraman Anantha Nageswaran, an academic and former executive with Credit Suisse Group AG and Julius Baer Group, has emerged as the front-runner to be chief economic adviser for India’s finance minister.

The new chief economic adviser will be expected to provide a recipe for high growth, while reviving investments and containing the budget gap.

The role requires advising on key policy matters to the finance minister, as well as being the lead author of the Economic Survey -- the annual report card of the economy that gets tabled in Parliament ahead of the budget. 

Previous advisers have used the the platform to bounce off ideas before the public. Subramanian, for instance, used “Thalinomics” -- equivalent to The Economist’s Big Mac Index -- to show how prices for a plate of food moved. The post had also been held by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former central bank governor Raghuram Rajan.

Nageswaran is a visiting distinguished professor of economics at Krea University in India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh. He got his doctorate in finance from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for his work on the empirical behavior.